Mahoniss Graham, 6, holds one of the treats he won for his first-grade class in a snow contest in February at the Syracuse Academy of Science.

(Ellen M. Blalock | eblalock@syracuse.com)

How smart is your first-grader?

Smart enough to explain the significance of the Code of Hammurabi?

Or explain the significance of gods and goddesses, ziggurats, temples and priests in Mesopotamia?

Or identify Hatshepsut as a pharaoh of ancient Egypt and explain her significance?

A lesson plan put forward as a model for schools by the New York State Department of Education says that by the end of the 16-lesson unit, first-graders will be able to do those things and much, much more - in fact, 78 other things, many of comparable complexity.

The unit on Early World Civilizations is part of a 10-unit English language arts curriculum for first-graders that the state is featuring on its engage.ny website. The state is featuring the curriculum for local school districts to use if they choose.

The state says the curriculum is a way to widen children's horizons, enrich their vocabularies and prepare them for the deeper learning that is part of the Common Core academic standards that have been adopted by New York and 44 other states.

For critics, it's a prime example of how out-of-touch they say New York's education bureaucrats have become.

"Many children in first grade have not yet learned to read, but they will be expected to understand and explain facts and concepts that belong in sixth or seventh or eighth or ninth or tenth or eleventh or twelfth grades," Diane Ravitch, a professor at New York University and a former U.S. assistant education secretary, wrote on her blog recently.

"Six-year-olds may have trouble pronouncing some of the words, let alone developing a historical sense of why these facts matter or how they relate to one another," she said.

She called the unit "a circus trick, an effort to prove that a 6-year-old can do mental gymnastics."

New York schools are required to prepare their students to meet the new academic standards, but they are not required to use any of the model curriculums put forward by the state. And by the looks of it, few districts are choosing to use this one.

Jeff Craig, assistant superintendent of the Onondaga-Cortland-Madison BOCES, said he doesn't believe any of the 23 school districts in the BOCES are adopting the curriculum. Neither is the Syracuse City School District, which is not a part of the BOCES.

Craig did not criticize the curriculum directly, but he did say the Early World Civilization unit "looks like it has some similarities with ninth- and tenth-grade global (studies)."

He said the curriculum has a stronger emphasis on historical facts and trends than local schools are looking for in first-grade English language arts.

The Education Department defends the curriculum, whose other first-grade units - or "domains," as it calls them -- include Early American Civilizations, Astronomy, the Human Body, the History of the Earth and more.

The units are part of a curriculum developed by the Virginia-based Core Knowledge Foundation and its founder, education scholar E.D. Hirsch. The state Education Department is using the prekindergarten through second grade portions as curriculum models.

The curriculum is based on the idea that children learn to read not just by gaining "decoding" skills but by hearing rich oral language and vocabulary and learning enough background knowledge to understand what they are reading.

Kate Gerson, senior fellow for Common Core and educator engagement for the Regents Research Fund, a privately funded non-profit that is consulting with the state Education Department, said the curriculum is developmentally appropriate.

The Early Worlds Civilizations unit is part of the curriculum's Listening and Learning strand, which involves teachers reading aloud to students. The readings expose children to vocabulary and "foundational knowledge" that they will build on year after year, Gerson said.

She said the lessons can be particularly important to children from low-literacy backgrounds who may not be exposed to rich vocabulary and texts. The read-alouds "recreate" the kinds of language and content children in affluent households hear every day, she said.

"They are exposed to NPR in the background. They're exposed to dinner-table conversation. They're exposed to older siblings being read complex texts. They're going to cultural museums..." she said. "We need to be sure that the experiences and exposures that our students are having are equal."

But for many local educators, Early World Civilizations is a bit too rich for first-graders.

Margie Carpenter, K-8 instructional coach for English language arts in the Liverpool school district and a supporter of the Common Core standards, said the unit contains many words that are important to the deeper understanding that the standards demand - words like explain, describe, identify and compare.

But when she read over the content of the unit at the request of The Post-Standard, she said it looked like a fifth- or sixth-grade unit.

"I think it would be overwhelming to a first-grader," she said.

Here are the 81 things the state says first-graders will be able to do after taking the Early World Civilizations unit. For the full model first-grade curriculum on the state's website, go here.